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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
Green wanted to write "an unsentimental cancer novel" that offered "some basis for hope."
PROFILES
THE TEEN WHISPERER
How the author of "The Fault in Our Stars" built an ardent army of fans.
BY MARGARET TALBOT
ILLUSTRATION BY BARTOSZ KOSOWSKI
In late 2006, the writer John Green
came up with the idea of communi-
cating with his brother, Hank, for a year
solely through videos posted to You-
Tube. The project wasn't quite as ex-
treme as it sounds. John, who was then
twenty-nine, and Hank, who was three
years younger, saw each other about once
a year, at their parents' house, and they
typically went several years between
phone calls. They communicated mainly
through instant messaging.
Hank was living in Missoula, where
he'd started a Web site about green tech-
nology. John was living on the Upper
West Side while his wife, Sarah Urist
Green, completed a graduate degree in
art history at Columbia. He had pub-
lished two young-adult novels, "Looking
for Alaska," in 2005, and "An Abun-
dance of Katherines," in 2006, and was
working on a third. Like the best realis-
tic Y.A. books, and like "The Catcher in
the Rye"---a novel that today would al-
most certainly be marketed as Y.A.---
Green's books were narrated in a clever,
confiding voice. His protagonists were
sweetly intellectual teen-age boys smitten
with complicated, charismatic girls. Al-
though the books were funny, their story
lines propelled by spontaneous road trips
and outrageous pranks, they displayed a
youthfully insatiable appetite for big
questions: What is an honorable life?
How do we wrest meaning from the
unexpected death of someone close to
us? What do we do when we realize
that we're not as special as we thought
we were?
Green was more forgiving toward
adults than Salinger was, but he shared
Salinger's conviction that they underesti-
mate the emotional depth of adolescents.
Green told me, "I love the intensity teen-
agers bring not just to first love but also
to the first time you're grappling with
grief, at least as a sovereign being---the
first time you're taking on why people
suffer and whether there's meaning in
life, and whether meaning is constructed
or derived. Teen-agers feel that what you
conclude about those questions is going
to matter. And they're dead right. It mat-
ters for adults, too, but we've almost
taken too much power away from our-
selves. We don't acknowledge on a daily
basis how much it matters."
Y.A. novels are peculiarly well suited
to consideration of ethical matters. It
seems natural when a high schooler like
Miles Halter, of "Looking for Alaska," is
depicted struggling to write essays on
topics like "What is the most important
question human beings must answer?"
Miles is equally preoccupied with girls
and with collecting the dying words of
famous people. (His favorite: Rabelais's
"I go to seek a Great Perhaps.") Though
"Looking for Alaska" sold modestly, it
won the Michael L. Printz Award, the
American Library Association's honor
for best Y.A. book of the year. At the
time, Green was living in Chicago,
working at the association's magazine,
Booklist, where he had reviewed books
in a peculiar constellation of subjects:
conjoined twins, boxing, and theology.
Upon graduating from Kenyon College,
in 2000, Green had thought of going to
divinity school, and he worked for six
months as an apprentice chaplain at a
children's hospital in Columbus. He
found the experience almost too sad to
bear, and decided that such a life was not
for him. Still, he remained deeply inter-
ested in spiritual matters, with one ex-
ception: "Is there a God?" struck him as
"one of the least interesting questions."
After "Alaska" won the prize, Green
quit his day job. He got more writing
done, but he missed the intellectual ca-
maraderie that he'd always had with his
peers. The YouTube project was, in part,